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Internet Hunting Banned in California
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 08, 2005 05:42 PM
from the crisis-of-the-nanosecond dept.
from the crisis-of-the-nanosecond dept.
TheSync writes "California has banned Internet hunting. Emergency regulations will be put in place by the California Fish and Game Commission, and legislation (SB 1028) is in the works. West Virginia is considering legislation against it as well. Hunters consider hunting by robot and mouse click 'a digrace to the sport,' whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine."
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You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Funny)
Can't control offshore shooting (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course most likely you'd not be really killing real animals, any more than you're talking to an innocent teen when you dial 0900-VIRGIINS. Instead you'd pay your $50 or whatever and the whole shooting would be mocked up, probably from Discovery channel footage. That way a few thousand cyberhunters get to "shoot" the same bambi and nobody really gets hurt except a few credit cards.
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Re:Can't control offshore shooting (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A good use for this. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A good use for this. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A good use for this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, but our big brains and opposable thumbs make us very good hunters (us very good tool builders/users can use tools to overcome our lack of running speed, sharp claws and sharp teeth). The calorie density of meat is the only reason your distant (and your fairly recent) ancestors flourished and resulted in a population that included you.
Among primitive man, nobody who lived very long was a vegetarian, and nobody had the luxury of buying their meat already killed and cleanly presented in the supermarket. If they didn't kill the animal themselves, they knew who did.
If you're a strict vegetarian, congrats, I haven't got much criticism for you (though I do dislike a lot of the self-deceptive propaganda you read). If you're not a vegetarian and you buy meat from a supermarket, there's only one response you deserve:
Sit down and shut the fuck up.
Having someone else kill your meat for you doesn't put you in any better ethical position than a hunter who kills his own meat. If anything, the hunter has some control over how much pain the animal feels as it dies. You'll need to be keeping a close watch on the slaughterhouse that supplies your butcher to claim the same ability. As someone who had an informal tour of an operating slaughterhouse, I know I can do better with a rifle. And after taking that tour, which showed me just how horrible the process is that puts cleanly wrapped cuts of meat on the supermarket shelf, I took up hunting again.
Regards,
Ross
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A vegetarians perspective... (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything, I have a lot more respect for someone that hunts his own meat (as long as he/she is a good shot and knows his limitations), than for someone who buys it neatly packaged at a supermarket.
But, people, if you are going to hunt, be responsible and learn to fcking shoot!.
People willing to take a shot at an animal, but not willing to put in the time to be good enough to make a clean kill (or track down a wounded animal whatever it takes) makes me sick.
They're not any better than "internet hunters".
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, that wasn't inflammatory.
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals -- they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:4, Funny)
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am Nefarious D. Felineslammer, and my company is Cat Assassins of Texas.
I can be reached at 1-800-DEADCAT, that's 1-800-DEADCAT.
Our motto is, You Pay, We Slay.
Call now to hear your last meow.
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Hunting (Score:5, Informative)
There wouldn't be a problem, except that the predators that would normally keep deer in check are largely absent. No one wants cougars or packs of wolves living near their town. But without these top predators, deer populations have nothing to keep their numbers down -- except hunting.
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
It's not unlike the paradox of the principal-of-least-harm. In order to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat nothing but large free-range ruminants. A vegetarian diet results in enormous numbers of rodents and insects being killed by threshers and harvesting machinery.
I guess I'm a little off-topic now...
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Re:Hunting (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not against hunting deer. Nor against hunting deer via robot hunters as long as the venison is taken with the intention of consumption.
But the argument that it is either hunting or letting the big bad wolf eat your children is not going to scare all of us. People can exists with cougars and wolfs just fine with the proper precautions.
The results of killing all the wolves has had bad effect in the hundred years since their elimination. As you say biodiversity has been harmed by largely unrestrained deer populations in some areas, but increasing hunting allowances is not the only answer.
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Re:Hunting (Score:5, Interesting)
But the public in most areas is largely unaware of what sort of damage the burgeoning deer population can do to the woods. They just graze and graze and cause automobile accidents. And interestingly enough, they are involved by far in more fatal attacks on people than any other North American wild mammal. Yet people fear the quite miniscule numbers of wolves and cougars...
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Re:Hunting (Score:5, Funny)
For those living in Kansas, they have been intelligently designed in a very short span of time.
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Re:Hunting (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in BC, in the woods. We have wolves, bears, and cougars. There was a steaming pile of bear shit in my yard 2 days ago. The thought of needing a shotgun to protect myself is ludicrous.
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Re:Hunting (Score:5, Insightful)
Wolves have been driven to near extinction in a great chunk of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Nobody likes living with large predators on their doorstep, and for that reason, they've been trapped and hunted to a shadow of original population levels.
Yes, we caused the problem, but our options right now to fix it are as follows: reintroduce high end predators to areas now contested for use with humans ( I favour this approach, and some places like the Algonquin Park have a blanket ban of wolf hunting, but not all agree ) or manually cull deer, etc, numbers. It's really that simple.
Of course, yes, the ecosystem will eventually rebalance to a new, diversity-poor, deer-heavy state if we do nothing - just as it has for 'so many millions of years' - but I like the ecosystem we have now, and I'd like to see steps to see it preserved.
-- YLFI
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, what really pisses me off is hunting wolves from aircraft in Alaska. Where the hell is the sport in that, I want to know.
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
Way to completely miss the point. He wasn't asking for the deer's approval, just like you don't ask the cow. He's merely taking personal responsibility for the killing, which you appear to object to.
There is a school of thought among hunters that personally using the resources provided by an animal you killed provides meaning to the death. Death is a part of life. If taking an animal's life helps to sustain my own and if the animal felt as little pain as possible during that death, I'm not going to feel the slightest bit guilty about my actions.
And that doesn't only mean I'm comfortable buying meat at the supermarket that someone else killed for me. I also include hunting for meat myself, exactly like the poster you replied to.
Regards,
Ross
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Interesting)
Except, you call it a "sport" and I call it "putting lean, healthy meat in my freezer, and helping to manage wildly out of balance deer populations."
I know a lot of hunters, and I don't know a single one - at all - that takes pleasure, per se, in the act of killing the animal they're taking. The nearest thing to it would be the pride they take in being good at it - which results (by way of a well placed shot) in a humane kill, and less wasted meat.
Now, I do know people that take great joy in swatting mosquitos, or killing rats in their house, etc. Those are people that kill a creature just for their own convenience/happiness. But those are as likely to be non-hunters as hunters.
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Damnit! (Score:5, Funny)
My rights online (Score:5, Funny)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah yeah "but timothy didn't say it thesync did" ever heard of being an editor? Ever heard of a respectable news site?
The funny part is that the first quote *is* a quote (minus the blatant spelling error, of course - congratulations again!) while the second part is complete and total fabrication.
You know what? Stuff like this doesn't help *anyone*. If you need to put words in people's mouths to make your point, your point has failed.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude...don't you know what site you're visiting? But I have to say, it's refreshing to see a bias AGAINST cruelty on here for a change. Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc.
But this time, here's a clear-cut case of something grotesquely cruel. I mean, how could a decent person say that it's OK to artificially stock animals in small fenced areas, and then have a remotely fired gun so people can blast these creatures through the Internet? Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong, and even most hunters would say so.
I thought I'd pass along a couple hunting-related links, taken from just the past couple of days. First, be sure to read Matthew Scully's superb article "Fear Factories," [cok.net] in this week's American Conservative. Animal rights is often incorrectly thought of as some fringe cause, only embraced by people on the left. Here, Scully writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue.
I publish Vegan.com, and I have some commentary on Scully's article on my podcast [vegan.com] from yesterday. You might want to listen to that as well.
And, what the heck, here's another article [fark.com] taken just today from Fark. One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter. Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming: Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them.
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Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Those are clearly off-topic rants by people who confuse a desire to prevent random acts of creulty with an inability to cope eating animal flesh. Change your filtering to a threshold of 2 or 3, and most of that problem goes away.
"[... a conservative] writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue."
Animal agriculture is also clearly an off-topic subject having nothing to do with the issue of point-and-click animal slaughter.
"I publish Vegan.com"
Ah... I guess I should have heard the other shoe dropping....
"One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter."
Ok, stupid hunter. That, by the way, is called manslaughter and as you say, "most hunters would agree with that."
"Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting."
I really hope you don't think that anyone thinks this way. Hunting accidents are almost always the fault of some lame-brain who can't tell his head from a moose, and no one is going to defend that kind of thing. Painting all hunters with that rather agregiously wide brush is rather unfortunate, however and borders on a straw man.
"Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them."
You understand that this is a collection of straw-man arguments and highly argumentative, right?
What exactly was the goal of your post? Were you just trying to get a few vegans riled up so that they would read your site, or were you actually trying to engage in some kind of rational discussion?
If the latter, please try again. Your frist attempt was buried in too much noise.
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MOD PARENT TO APPLE HATER HELL (Score:4, Funny)
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Why does there need to be a law for everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does there need to be a law for everything? How can the banning of Internet hunting be regulated, anyhow? What is the state going to do; get ISPs to look at the logs of everybody who are signed up at Internet hunting sites? Doesn't California have better and more important things to focus on, such as balancing the budget?
Re:Why does there need to be a law for everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
You see, they don't want unlicensed people using firearms in the state of California, especially when said persons aren't even IN the state but are using Video over IP and a computer to aim and fire a real gun.
Internet hunting is, form a safety perspective, a very dumb and dangerous idea.
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Think if it from a hunter's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think there needs to be a law for everything, but to me this is a case where hunters are saying that they don't want hunting to become inundated with people who are not hunters.
Hunting isn't just about taking out your high-powered rifle and wasting an animal. You have to be out in the environment. You have to be where the animal is in order to kill it. While the technology for finding and killing animals has become more advanced, there is a connection between the hunter and the prey . I'm not a hunter, but every hunter I've ever talked to takes this seriously.
It seems to me that one of the primary reasons people go out early in the morning and spend long hours in the woods looking for animals to kill, then doing the dirty work of dispatching the animals and hauling their dead bodies is that they want to be closer to the life and death struggle of nature. They want to feel less removed from it, not more removed from it.
In that sense, a ban on Internet hunting is a way of saying that they want to preserve this aspect of hunting, so that it is not overwhelmed by people who have no sense of what hunting is all about, and think of it as merely a video game featuring live animals. While I don't hunt because I don't see the need to kill animals in order to feel closer to nature, or in order to prove my dominance over other creatures, I can understand why hunters would want to keep hunting from becoming an exercise that requires no interaction with the natural world.
As a side note, California does have to focus on balancing the budget, but I hardly think it's a question of balancing the budget or passing a law banning Internet hunting.
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About time... (Score:4, Funny)
Was this important to you? (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds like passing a law for PR, nothing else. We dont need feel good, nanny laws created. This is law is purely about ones feeling about hunting, nothing more.
People need to stop passing more laws for behavior and freedoms of the people, and deal with voilent crimes, polution or robbery. They need to stay out of peoples lives and hobbies.
If they said "No Church Online" you bet there would be more people talking about this law.
Serriously, do you need to be told what you can watch, what you can eat, who you can marry, whats proper in your own home? Damn if you people dont see this is a fluff law you are a sheep.
Innocent animals? (Score:5, Insightful)
My brother-in-law is hunter in SW Ontario. We all enjoy the spoils of his "sport" Not much of the animal is wasted. Let me tell you, fresh Ontario Bambi steak off the charcoal BBQ is to die for. I have vension steaks and gound/minced vension for chilli in my freezer too, and will be a far healthier for me than N. American beef that has been pumped full of anti-biotics and growth hormone, fed things that aren't part of its normal diet and has more chance of giving me nvCJD than anything from the UK. And yes, I am aware that there is an epidemic in parts of N. America where elk and deer are dying of a disease similar to BSE.
For all those meat eaters out there who make anti-hunting comments: are you prepared to kill you own animals, gut them, and prepare them? Or will only accept it in the sterilised format from the supermarket? Think about it. Some people have good reasons, some are just hypocrits.
Finally, I do realise there is some basis for the author's statement. I do realise that there are "hunters" out there who are just in it for the guns and killing. I don't have much respect for them either. Maybe there is a cultural difference between the US and Canada too (somebody please enlighten me) - muzzle-loading season for deer around here lasts one week, the rest of the time my brother-in-law has to hunt with a bow and arrow (crossbow in recent years actually).
Sadistic people (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to go out in the woods playing super predator, tracking and stalking, have fun. When you catch your prey why not shoot it with a paintball gun and call it a day? I don't get the thrill out of killing animals.
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Hunting should be promoted in all forms (Score:4, Funny)
It's so much more humane to blow the brains out of your food than to ruthlessly rip it out of the ground. Plants have no chance. They have no fight or flight mechanisms.
Re:PETA approved (Score:5, Funny)
-It' ok to eat fish because fish don't have any feelings. -KC
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Re:PETA approved (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Insightful)
so you're crapping in the bushes and a deer comes along and you shoot it with your high powered rifle, easy right? But on some level you now understand what its like to crap in the bushes like a deer. And for understanding this, the killing process becomes very real.
over the internet it is no longer hunting. Its a video game where things actually die, there is no connect.
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Re:Wait... Logic Check...(offtopic but true) (Score:5, Funny)
But on some level you now understand what its like to crap in the bushes like a deer.
Or piss on one.
My dad and I were hunting years back on a tree farm. About 20 minutes before sunrise (can't shoot here till then) he went off to take a leak. A minute later I hear some loud rustling and he yelled astring of curses.
He had walked up to a clump of tall grasses and was relieving himself when a buck jumped up from within the grass, where it was sleeping, and ran off. My dad had pissed on it and woke it up.
He said "imagine being that buck's wife and trying to explain who's scent that is!"
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there are a lot of road hunters and people who just sit by camp and hit things way off in the distance (sniping does require some form of skill though).
But then there are those who like the challenge. Some of my friends hunt with hand-made spears. Some of the crazy ones go out with a pack, and make the spear themselves in the forest, then hunt. I consider them real, true hunters.
I bow hunt elk mainly, and I'd say there's a slightly greater than 50% chance I'll bag one in a season. We go out into true wilderness, walking and do it. I don't shoot unless I'm closer than 30 yards, which is generally pretty hard in the area we hunt. Then I pack it out 10 miles on my own back. My father loses 20 pounds every hunt we go on.
But let's get realistic for a second. Since when was nearly any hunt that man did fair? We're smarter, and we had the mental capabilities to easily slaughter huge numbers of animals for 10,000+ years. Complaining about hunting "no longer" being a challenge is a bit disingenuous. It hasn't been a challenge for thousands of years. We used to light fires to drive animals towards the hunters, or drive whole herds of animals off of cliffs. Baiting and partially domesticating wild animals with offers of food, then slaughtering them. I'd say that things are a lot fairer now than they were thousands of years ago, but not quite as fair as they were maybe 200 years ago. Largely due to it being more of a sport now than sustenance. Back in the day, it didn't matter if you killed a whole herd of 200 animals to get one, because you'd die if you didn't get that one. Today, we just go out and get that one. If we don't, then we hit the supermarket.
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Funny)
In keeping with my roots, I do a similar thing when I buy a plastic and styrofoam refridgerated package of boneless, skinless chicken breast for $1.99/lb.
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case, I *have* been deer hunting and goose hunting --- myself armed with a camera, and my companions with guns. I've had a bleeding deer carcase in my lap for 45 miles bouncing along in an open jeep in 25F weather,
I don't think I could pull the trigger, and there is that little issue that I'm a vegetarian. But I don't hate "hunters."
I do, however, hate dickwads with guns. In my day job, I put up scientific apparatus in remote places, and dickwads with guns use my antennas for target practice, chop up my coax, steal the guy lines, and generally remind us that the gene pool has a shallow end.
But if there is one group of people who should *really* loathe dickwads with guns, it is
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Hunters (Score:5, Informative)
As a sidenote, dickwads with anything are a problem. Is there really any tool you would trust a dickwad with? Guns are just a particularly extreme example.
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An assload?! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think this could be funnier if you tried.
--Rob
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Re:Priorities -- what can you say for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:News... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because an unbelievable number of people think like that. You know, people who wear nice leather shoes, eat some meat with their dinner, and who have a domestic cat that, despite eating three times a day in the kitchen, stalks and kills neighborhood songbirds just because it's fun. People are spectacularly hypocritical and uninformed about this stuff, and know nothing about the monumental amount of work and cash that hunters put into wildlife management programs and wilderness preservation.
On tonight's dinner menu at my house: pheasant that my wife, my dog, and I laboriously hunted in South Dakota last October. During that outing we pumped a couple thousand dollars into the vapor-thin local economy, walked over miles and miles of farmland, always filling in the host farmers on what we saw in their cornrows and pastures. The "innocent animal" bit only makes sense if you also consider mosquitos innocent, the earthworms that get sliced up by farm equipment creating vegan meals to be innocent, and so on. Bah. This topic is so rife with nonsensical, contradictory emotional baggage and anthropomorphized Disney-esque pablum. Yeesh.
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Re:Hunting on foot much safer (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. The internet hunting takes place on private grounds nowhere near populated areas, so it's safe. The concern is really the morality of it.
Also hunting on foot is a lot more noble and is a tradition that has been carried out for thousands of years.
Indeed.
And I might add this: most countries where hunting has been a tradition for centuries couldn't afford not having hunters. What I mean is, the hunter is part of the ecological balance of whatever area they hunt in. Take them out of the picture, and suddenly certain species of game, previously hunted, see their numbers soar, destabilizing the ecological niches of numerous other species, and introducing diseases and malformations in their numbers, due to overpopulation.
In many countries, hunters regularly conduct what they call "cynegetic management", or "sanitary shootings", which is essentially the removing of weak and diseased surplus animals. Those sanitary kills can also preserve endangered species, by lightening the burden on their food sources and the predatory pressure on them. This game management is healthy for the environment, which is what most green anti-hunting folks fail to understand.
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Re:Snide remark (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Snide remark (Score:4, Funny)
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